Document Wars

What an amazing conversation. It's true that ODF was NOT designed to be compatible with MSOffice and the legacy binary format. That's not to say there were not considerable efforts within the OASIS Open Office XML TC (ODF) pushing for compatibility. But Sun successfully held off these efforts, insisting that ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice or the MSOffice binaries. Many asked the obvious question, "How are end users supposed to convert their information (billions of legacy "in-process" binary documents) to ODF if ODF is not designed for that conversion?" Stellent, represented by Phil Boutros, and Corel, represented by Paul Langille and Tom Magliery, were particularly obsessed with this problem. Without "compatibility", how were end users supposed to convert their documents? Needless to say, Sun prevailed. ODF is 100% perfectly compatible with OpenOffice/StarOffice, by design. It is not compatible with the billions of "in-process" compound business documents essential to world trade, commerce and information exchange. What a shame, ~ge~

Commission v. MIcrosoft Redux.

Like most people i've been looking for a clear statement from Oracle concerning the future of MySQL and OpenOffice.  Although the title is promising, this article is short on facts, long on speculation and actually raises more doubts than it answers questions.  Some of the "assumptions" made by the author, Samara Lynn, are incredible.  And apparently unfounded.  I'll highlight with diigo the hyperbole statements.  Maybe someone else has the answers?  And where was Phil Boutros? intro:  Although eclipsed by Apple's iPad announcement, Oracle announced yesterday its intentions with Sun products, now that the acquisition of Sun Microsystems is complete. The announcement, which was actually a planned webcast, reassured those worried over the fate of two open-source Sun products for small business: the database software, MySQL and the productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. The acquisition might make MySQL and OpenOffice.org even more competitive against costly Microsoft counterparts (SQL Server and Microsoft Office).

Need to respond to Graeme Harrison's comment!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ODF was created on the principles that interoperability and innovation were paramount, and that these are based on open standards. Not coincidentally, ODF's creation coincided with the growing support of open ICT architectures, which grew from the Web model where the standardization of HTML, an open, royalty-free standard, enabled the Web to be an open platform that enabled much innovation on top of it. The key was interoperability, or the ability of multiple parties to communicate electronically, without the need to all run the same application software or operating system. Also critical to the development of ODF was the introduction of OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite that first implemented the format, and the rise of XML as a widely supported foundational standard for describing structured data.

Good review of Florian's work on the libOPC project!  Sadly i wrote a lengthy comment on this, but then made the mistake of sending it to Facebook where they clipped off 80% of what i had written.  Huge mistake on my part.  Facebook continues to piss me off in ever new and innovative ways.

Classic argument about ODF vs OOXML.  Need to send Rick an explanation about how the da Vinci plug-in works.  It is entirely possible to capture everythign MSOffice editors do in ODF using namespace extensions compliant with ODF 1.1 standard.   What was impossible was to round-trip those MSOffice ODF documents to OpenOffice.org.  And as it turns out, replacing MSOffice/Windows on new workgroup desktops with OpenOffice/Linux was one of the primary objectives behind the Massachussetts effort to standardize on ODF.  They believed the hype that ODF was cross platform interoperable.  It wasn't then, and it still isn't five years later. As for capturing all the complexities and nuances of the very robust MSOffice productivity environment and authoring system?  Sure, ODf could easily be extended for that. What an incredible discussion!

"Prepending "really" to "open standard" in context is simply preposterous. "

Somehow i got involved in this discussion and ended up posting a number of comments explaining the how and why behind Microsoft's push for ISO approval of MS-OOXML. I have been working on a paper titled, "Breaking the Web to Ride the Great Wave". Breaking the Web is what will happen once ISO approves MS-OOXML. The MIcrosoft Stack of Web Servers (Exchange, SharePoint, MS-SQL Server) are integrated into the MSOffice-Outlook desktop. The MS desktop dominates much of the document workflows and business processes of the commercial world. ISO approval of the MSOffice specific MS-OOXML will legitamize MSOffice as an editor of standardized web ready docuemnts. But how MS-OOXML docuemnts become "Web REady" is tricky. In the December 2007 MSOffice SDK beta, we see how this is done. The SDK provides a conversion component for the quick high fidelity conversion of MS-OOXML documents to XAML. XAML is a proprietary part of the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) layer of the .NET framework, and is easily paried with Silverlight. Sometimes XAML is referred to as "fixed/flow". XAML is an MS proprietary replacement for the W3C's (X)HTML. Billions of MSOffice docuemnts will make their way to the Web using this SDK converter. The path for transitioning the monopolist hold on desktop business processes to the monopolist stack of web servers is set with this converter. ISO approval of MS-OOXML will enable Microsoft to dodge brining their desktop editor into compliance with advancing W3C standards such as (X)HTML, CSS 3, XForms, SVG and RDF. Instead of these open standards, transitioning business processes will be locked into MS only dependencies; XAML, Silverlight, WinForms, and Smart Tags. The breaking of the web results in a consumer/business cloud dependent on MS proprietary technologies that are out of the reach of Firefox, Apache, Java, and Adobe technologies. Google won't be able to penetrate the business stack, and will be kept very busy trying to defen

referred from http://identi.ca/notice/14365521